Concentration camps reveal the nature of the modern state

Further, anybody who really understands exactly what the United States did to Japan during WW2 would be very, very hard pressed to declare "modern people are squeemish about killing."

(Seriously, this is almost exactly backwards. Nothing the Mongols ever did could even approach the destruction of modern conflicts.)

> Concentration camps are only necessary now because most people won't stand for such atrocities, and states therefore feel compelled to carry them out in relative secrecy.

Again, this is backwards. Concentration camps are the most basic kind of state terrorism. The goal of modern camps is always to inspire fear in a population in an economically efficient manner. The same is true of historical genocides and slavery. They were tools of terror. What previous governments lacked but the modern state possesses in abundance is the ability to track, contain, and feed large populations. Once you can do this it makes much more economic sense to terrorise your enemy's population than it does to completely annihilate the city (and destroy lots of valuable infrastructure [1]) or enslave the population (slaves are often not very productive from an economic perspective). Hence concentration camps.

The article is probably a bit off too. There are even more sophisticated forms of state terrorism available today which largely obsolete concentration camps. Mass surveillance (once you can convince the population they are always being watched most will self-regulate), mass debt (if you really want to control a man give him a 30 year mortgage, to control a country give them insfrastructure loans) and mass institutionalization (force most people into prison or universities). You are far more likely to see modern statesmen advocating for more surveillance powers and "tougher" laws or economic fines/seizures against whoever happens to be enemy.

[1] To get down to it, the two basic reasons modern states don't annihilate population centers is (a) nuclear weapons which blow out all cost/benefits calculations (b) global trade has produced highly interconnected goods and services networks. Note that (a) and (b) reinforce one another.

This statement was the one I found most intriguing in the entire article, but then the author did not expand on it. Maybe he does so in his book. It was strange to me to consider that this state of the world has not always been the norm.

When I looked into it, I found conflicting sources of information. Anyone with knowledge on the subject feel like expanding on this?

https://ia801609.us.archive.org/21/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.1...

"Nationalism emerged to agitate the world only after the war, and the first visible phenomenon which this intellectual epidemic of our century brought about was xenophobia : morbid dislike of the foreigner, or at least fear of the foreigner. The world was on the defensive against strangers, everywhere they got short shrift. The humiliations which once had been devised with criminals alone in mind now were imposed upon the traveller, before and during every journey. There had to be photographs from right and left, in profile and full face, one’s hair had to be cropped sufficiently to make the ears visible; fingerprints were taken, at first only the thumb but later all ten fingers ; furthermore, certificates of health, of vaccination, police certificates of good standing, had to be shown ; letters of recommendation were required, invitations to visit a country had to be procured ; they asked for the addresses of relatives, for moral and financial guarantees, questionnaires, and forms in triplicate and quadruplicate needed to be filled out, and if only one of this sheaf of papers was missing one was lost.

Petty details, one thinks. And at the first glance it may seem petty in me even to mention them. But our generation has foolishly wasted irretrievable, valuable time on those senseless pettinesses. If I reckon up the many forms I have filled out during these years, declarations on every trip, tax declarations, foreign exchange certificates, border passes, entrance permits, departure permits, registrations on coming and on going ; the many hours I have spent in anterooms of consulates and officials, the many inspectors, friendly and unfriendly, bored and overworked, before whom I have sat, the many examinations and interrogations at frontiers I have been through, then I feel keenly how much human dignity has been lost in this century which, in our youth, we had credulously dreamed of as one of freedom, as of the federation of the world. The loss in creative work, in thought, as a result of those spirit-crushing procedures is incalculable. Have not many of us spent more time studying official rules and regulations than works of the intellect ! The first excursion in a foreign country was no longer to a museum or to a world-renowned view, but to a consulate, to a police office, to get a “permit" When those of us who had once conversed about Baudelaire’s poetry and spiritedly discussed intellectual problems met together, we would catch ourselves talking about affidavits and permits and whether one should apply for an immigration visa or a tourist visa ; acquaintance with a stenographer in a consulate who could cut down one’s waiting- time was more significant to one’s existence than friendship with a Toscanini or a Rolland. Human beings were made to feel that they were objects and not subjects, that nothing was their right but everything merely a favour by official grace. They were codified, registered, numbered, stamped and even today I, as a case-hardened creature of an age of freedom and a citizen of the world-republic of my dreams, count every impression of a rubber-stamp in my passport a stigma, every one of those hearings and searches a humiliation. They are petty trifles, always merely trifles, I am well aware, trifles in a day when human values sink more rapidly than those of currencies. But only if one notes such insignificant symptoms will a later age be able to make a proper clinical record of the mental state and mental disturbances with which our world was seized between the two World Wars.

I agree with this even more than you do. If my understanding of history is correct, the Nazis, whom you single out as an exception, weren't so from the beginning. This:

> Most mass killing simply consists of taking groups of people somewhere remote and shooting them.

was what they did with their 'undesireables' for a long time, too; and, as you point out:

> Concentration camps are what you do when you don't want to do that and are basically a cheap form of prison.

I think that they originally intended their concentration camps as a marshalling point for future deportation, and (later?) a source of slave labour. It was only at the Wannsee Conference in 1942, I think, that they decided to turn some concentration camps into extermination camps. (Indeed, one could make the point that your statement is true by definition; a camp intended for killing ceases to be, or just to be, a concentration camp. However, probably this sort of semantic quibble is not what you meant.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_VII https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be%C5%82%C5%BCec_extermination...